A Workshop on Extensible Distributed Systems

Cornell University, Ithaca NY

Investigators

Abstract

A Distributed System is a system consisting of multiple computers communicating through message passing. In the past 50 years, distributed systems have evolved from being a novelty to a fact of life---a very large fraction of computers today are part of a distributed system. With computers, sensors, and actuators becoming embedded in virtually every device, users are themselves becoming, as it were, embedded in a ubiquitous computing fabric. An Extensible Distributed System is a distributed system that is pervasively integrated into people's environments. The distributed systems research community has developed models and techniques that have supported this remarkable success story and enabled technologies, such as cloud computing, that have the potential to fundamentally change the way in which individuals, businesses, and government access computing resources. The pervasive or ubiquitous systems community in the meantime has leveraged distributed systems and networking technology, as well as artificial intelligence, to integrate devices even closer into our experience. And in the post Dennard-Scaling era, computer architecture is undergoing a profound transformation, and, in an effort to address the conflicting goals of delivering performance and saving energy, it is exploring designs that are exporting weaker abstractions to software developers. There are, however, gaps between the foundations built by the various research communities and the opportunities offered by today's and tomorrow's applications and infrastructure. To respond to these challenges, the field not only needs to profoundly retool today's techniques and abstractions, but also to develop a new vision, designed to address the opportunities offered by new hardware, new networking, and new applications. This project supports a workshop that will serve as a catalyst for triggering the process of reflection and innovation necessary to develop this new vision and the research agenda that will bring it about. Extensible Distributed Systems are the cornerstone of, to name a few, cloud computing, sensor/actuator networks, and industrial control systems, and their impact and ubiquity is likely to only increase in the next decade. The in-depth discussions about the state of field and research agenda that this workshop aims to develop are thus likely to have tremendous impact on society. In addition to helping define a research agenda for the extensible distributed systems community, this workshop will help crystallize the shape of future graduate and undergraduate education in distributed computing. The workshop will balance academic and industrial participation, will engage leaders in the field, and will actively seek participation from underrepresented groups.